


Where at last the sea's line is the sky's

by B29



Series: The Bay Quartet [4]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Episode: s05e12 Safe House, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:53:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27279805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/B29/pseuds/B29
Summary: Kevin eats breakfast, talks to his mother-in-law, and grapples with an epistemological problem.
Relationships: Kevin Cozner & Laverne Holt, Kevin Cozner/Raymond Holt
Series: The Bay Quartet [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1987693
Comments: 6
Kudos: 69





	Where at last the sea's line is the sky's

Kevin wakes late.

It is unusual for him, and only partially his own fault. Apparently rescuing one’s kidnapped husband from a notorious criminal warrants more enthusiastic expressions of gratitude than a simple _thank-you_. Unless it was for finishing the ironing, which it seems Raymond has been less than diligent about.

Either way, he’s not complaining.

He locates his slippers and enters the breakfast room. Raymond is sitting at the head of the table, as he always does, the sun illuminating the left side of his face, which Kevin has always thought he surely cannot enjoy, even if it does make him look so starkly regal that Kevin has to pause momentarily in the doorway.

“Good morning,” says Raymond, sitting at the head of the table, despite the uneven light, where he can see both Kevin and the street beyond the window at once, _as he always has_ , and which Kevin has simply never questioned, because of course Raymond, commanding as he is, sits at the head of their breakfast table. He doesn’t look up, but taps two fingers against the place setting to his left, inviting Kevin to take his seat.

Kevin’s seat, because he always takes the seat to Raymond’s left, his back to the window, for a myriad of reasons: it’s closer to Raymond; there’s no need to squint against the morning sun; it provides a better view of the doorway when Cheddar inevitably appears.

It’s strange to see their familiar breakfast scene like this, as though for the first time. He revels in the way the room smells of old wood and fresh fruit, and in the luxury of not caring that there is a window at his back, and in the new and startling fact that Raymond has, as it turns out, always been seated in the perfect position to best ensure Kevin’s safety.

How strange, to realise that he hadn't known this, has spent years not knowing this, and that it had been none the less true all that time simply because Kevin hadn't known.

“Good morning,” he says, and allows himself to smile as he surveys the table, the newspaper already set by the plate for him. Then, as a pretext to better admire the sight of Raymond in pyjamas and a dressing-gown– which is ridiculous, but he hasn’t seen those lovely pale pinstripes in two months– he slips the crossword page from the _Times_ and hands it over.

Raymond takes it automatically, their fingers brushing, and then meets his eyes. 

“Thank-you,” he says, in a tone of voice wholly inappropriate for nine o’clock in the morning.

Kevin feels uncomfortably flushed all the way through breakfast.

***

“Thank-you,” says Raymond, when Kevin solves nine across, _gerund_ , and he looks so pleased and so handsome in his reading glasses that Kevin, after reflexively checking that they’re alone, stoops down over the armchair to kiss him.

***

“Thank-you,” says Raymond, when he comes out to water the roses and finds Kevin on his knees in the dirt, pulling up the weeds, and goes to fetch him a glass of water.

***

“Thank-you,” says Raymond, when Kevin brings back orchids for the kitchen table, having walked Cheddar past the flower stand in order to do so, because he is not a stupid man and can see what Raymond is doing. 

***

“Raymond has related the facts of the case to me,” says the Honourable Laverne Holt. “I can’t thank you enough.”

Kevin, who can be polite when the occasion requires it, truly intends to say _thank-you, Your Honour_. What he says instead, entirely without thinking, is, “apparently, neither can he.”

“Ah.”

He waits.

“Raymond,” she continues after a moment of reflection, “is somewhat apt to confuse thanks and apology.”

“I have always wondered why he does that,” Kevin admits. It’s not as though he could be unaware of the distinction between the two. Perhaps that’s why it’s never irritated him as it ought to.

Then again, so many things about Raymond don’t.

“It's because when he has wronged someone he likes, he feels gratitude towards them for their forbearance in suffering the injury.” Kevin nods twice before realising that he’s being ridiculous. “Have you forgiven him yet?”  
  
“I’m sorry?”

Laverne Holt doesn’t answer, which means she considers Kevin to have all the necessary information at his disposal, and the intellectual capacity to arrive at her conclusion.

How many men, he wonders, are blessed with such a mother-in-law?

“Oh,” says Kevin. “Yes, of course.”

“But he doesn’t know that you have.”

He’s about to argue; has even opened his mouth to correct her. Raymond _must_ know. Then he remembers Jake’s conviction, in the safe house, that he would divorce Raymond. What he himself had said, angry and miserable, and still not retracted. 

“I believe he will realise.”

“You could tell him. It may help.”

He could. It might. He just doesn't _want_ to.

“I will,” he promises anyway, because he likes her. Because of how cruel it would be if the frustrations of the safe house, which for Kevin had fallen away so effortlessly, should still be making Raymond miserable.

“Are you free on Sunday?” If she’s decided to ask no further about it, then she trusts him. He bites back a smile before answering her.

“We are.”

“Then you are both invited to dinner.”

“Thank-you, Your Honour. We would be delighted.”

***

“Thank-you,” says Raymond, still holding the plate he’d just cleaned, wearing one of those intense expressions of his that still, even now, make Kevin’s legs feel rather weak. It’s absurd, and frankly unfair. They’ve been together for nearly _forty years_. “For apprehending a dangerous criminal. And rescuing me. And Peralta.”

Kevin wonders if this is the closest Raymond will get to asking if he’s forgiven. If so, he doesn’t want his answer to be mistaken.

“You’re welcome,” he tells him, trying to convey the full force of his feelings with it. “Of course.”

Of course, it doesn’t feel like enough.

***

“I am sorry,” says Raymond, finally, and Kevin buries his hands in Cheddar’s fur and wonders why it is so hard to tell him what was so easy to tell Jake, that he loves him and will not abandon him.

Then he's irritated at himself. He knows why it was so easy to tell Jake. To tell Jake was simply stating a fact. But if he has to say it aloud, here, if he has to tell him, he acknowledges the possibility that Raymond might not already know. And how could he not know?

“I’m sorry,” he says instead, “for being ridiculous.”

Raymond understands.

*** 

A few days later, when they return from dinner with the Honourable Laverne Holt, there is a postcard of a ship on the doormat. Kevin reads it, smiles, and when Raymond holds out a hand, passes it over for him to inspect.

Raymond stands in the front hall, turning it over and over in growing consternation, and Kevin simply admires the furrowing of his brow.

He doesn't say _thank-you_ once.

***

Kevin wakes early.

“Seumas Murphy is pleading guilty,” says Raymond sleepily beside him, his beloved face illuminated only by the phone screen, and Kevin collapses back against the pillows.

Raymond leans over, propping himself up with one hand on the mattress next to Kevin’s lower ribcage, and kisses him.

It is a very, very long kiss.

“Were you worried?” Kevin asks him breathlessly, catching his elbow before he can get up to open the drapes. Raymond is often less reserved in the dark.

“You are very brave,” Raymond says, in lieu of an answer, and Kevin, instinctively preening at the praise, regrets the lack of light. He wants to see his husband’s face. 

“Which you knew.”  
  
“Which I knew,” Raymond agrees. “And you are also very capable.”  
  
“Of which you likewise were aware.”

“I was not aware that you were capable of fighting off armed gangsters.”

“Raymond–” frustration gets the better of him, and Kevin flicks on the bedside lamp, throwing low yellow light on Raymond’s grave expression. “Raymond. You _taught_ me that punch.”

“I worry,” says Raymond, voice slow and careful, “that I underestimated you. Throughout my career, you have never once behaved as though you thought me incapable of keeping myself safe. And yet I failed to extend the same trust to you.”

Kevin takes his hand and pulls him a little closer, feeling the warmth radiating from his skin.

“Raymond," he says slowly. "You are a police officer. I am a professor. Seumas Murphy, in case you had forgotten–” that’s cruel of him, given the two months Raymond has just had, but Kevin has never claimed to be a saint. He only married one– “is a criminal who had two people in witness protection programs killed.”

“Three.”

“Sorry?”

“He has had three people in witness protection programs killed.”

“Well, precisely.” Kevin knows he sounds impatient, but he is acutely aware that he is running out of time. Once Seumas Murphy is convicted, Raymond will not want to discuss this again. “Raymond, I trust you no less because I would choose somebody else to translate Seneca for me–” he feels the flinch in Raymond’s fingers. He’s thinking of the St. Augustine incident– “no matter how well you might do in an emergency. You know that.”

Raymond nods, once, then chuckles to himself. Kevin doesn’t need to ask to know that he’s imagining some Seneca-based crisis.

“A _Phaedra-_ mergency,” he mutters under his breath, and Kevin laughs too, wondering how on earth this man could think that Kevin would leave him, and then struggling to regain his composure because apparently Raymond does, and that means he needs to be braver.

“I know that you trust me. Do _not_ confuse my frustration at confinement for some deep-seated feeling of ill-treatment.”

Raymond is quiet, and Kevin thinks about all the things that his husband, who says _thank-you_ when he means _sorry_ , is trying to say, here on their bed in the dark, with the morning held at bay behind the drapes.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says finally, tapping a finger over Raymond’s wedding ring before relinquishing his hand and standing to draw the drapes. “Tell me you knew that.”

“I know it,” says Raymond. At last, he sounds as if he actually does.

Kevin smiles, and turns to let the light in.

**Author's Note:**

> Has Kevin, having finally said one non-oblique thing to his husband, solved all of Captain Holt's insecurities forever?
> 
> Obviously not. Thank goodness The Bimbo exists.


End file.
